Whether your wedding and event business is large or small, obtaining and keeping more customers is an important business priority, and can be challenging! Engaged couples often “shop around” for their Perfect Pros and contact several at a time. Your business needs to first capture their attention to get an inquiry but you’ll also need to keep their attention from the first contact to a signed contract.

Lead management is the ability to capture, respond to and manage incoming leads. Lead management is a process that should start even before the first inquiry and continue throughout the entire lifecycle. Having a successful lead management process in place helps educate engaged couples about your business and helps you understand more about potential clients, which will lead to more bookings!

Premium WeddingWire Pros have a variety of tools that help them manage incoming leads and turn them into customers. Below are the 4 strategies for successful lead management!

Make it easy for prospects to submit inquiries.

The best way to get more inquiries is to make it extremely easy for engaged couples to contact you! We’ve made it easy with a large, blue Contact Us button that appears on your Storefront and feeds directly to your inquiries in the Clients tab. In addition to the Contact Us button on your Storefront, we provide you with several other ways to collect inquiries. You can find the code for a Contact Us button widget for your business’s website in our Widget Gallery. This widget will add the same Contact Us button to your website and feed it directly to your WeddingWire account. Having this widget in multiple places makes it easy for couples to contact you no matter where they first learn about your business!

Use questionnaires to qualify your leads.

An inquiry is just the first step in the process of lead management. When an engaged couple submits an inquiry, they’re not likely to give you all the information you need. Couples use inquiries to decide if you’re a good fit for them, but how do you know if the couple is a good fit for you? Our Questionnairesgive you the flexibility to request all of your must-have information before an event, ensuring that you have all the details you need. Create and send questionnaires to potential clients before they sign a contract and you’ll be able to decide whether or not the couple fits in with your schedule and would benefit from your goods or services. You can customize your questionnaires for each client, and to ask the questions that are most important for your business category.

Keep your leads secure with individual client sites.

More than ever, your prospects expect to transact and communicate with you online. Managing the process over email, fax or mail can easily eat up a lot of time when couples are looking to make decisions in a quick time frame. Our Client Sites allow you to easily communicate with your prospects and coordinate the necessary details for every event. Once you’ve determined that the lead is ready to become a customer from the information obtained through their inquiry and questionnaire, you can create a personalized, password-protected client site for them. Publish their contract to the client site and they’ll be able to securely e-sign and send back quickly. You can also accept payments via the client site, meaning that all of your interactions with your client can be found in one place. By making the couple feel secure about their dealings online, you’ll be sure to close more deals.

Understand your audience’s needs.

None of the strategies above can be completed without knowing and understanding your audience’s needs. Couples have a lot of choices in today’s world, so building a relationship with your leads and prospects is extremely important. If you know the type of information they want from you, try to provide it up front to help make their decisions easier. Keep your forms and questionnaires short so they don’t get too overwhelmed in their initial dealings with your business. Use the information they provide you to learn more about their interests and needs and then tailor your responses to meet those needs. The better the relationship you build up front, the better the entire process will be, from start to end!

Achieving success in lead management by using these strategies will help your business grow. A better understanding of your customers and how you can best serve them will make your job and their decisions easier!